Wildlife Photographer of the Year - UnderwaterWildlife Photographer of the Year - Underwater 

This is ‘Under the Waterline’ by Matthew Smith from the UK and Australia. This photo was taken in Paradise Harbour, Antarctica and is the 2024 category winner of ‘Underwater’. They're very black with glints of eggshell whites on the tops. They're very piercing. They're at the bottom of the photo, but your eye is immediately drawn to them as they're so striking. The leopard seal is facing the camera head on. It's looking directly at you. It's facing forward, staring practically into your eyes. It almost has a slight smile. It looks to be under a layer of ice at the top of the image and you can see green blue water. It's a curved layer of ice, not a straight line, and it has a dip in the middle of the image. It looks a bit like the bottom of a boat. It's a metallic grey and has a glint where the light is hitting it at the top. The colour of the image in the right-hand corner at the bottom looks very dark, almost jet black. It's the deep dark of the sea. It gradually moves into an electric blue as you go from the bottom right to the top of the image. It then moves into a white near the top. The background is quite dark, clear water and the leopard seal is the focus of the image. But there are some shadows in the top left. Perhaps they're the fins of the seal. The leopard seal is slightly curving towards the camera with the head face on with the camera. But its body and its right fin is slightly curving towards the left side of the photo. It looks almost as if the leopard seal is swimming towards the camera from the left of the photo. You can't see it fully in the image, because it's quite dark, but the seal appears to be a dark grey like that of a beach pebble. And it's also got that same sort of pebbling or speckling of light greys and whites throughout its coat on the left-hand side of the image. You can also only see one of its front fins, and that's on its right. The fin looks almost like a shadow because of how dark it is under the water. The electrics are light blue and the jet black in the corner of the photograph make it look very cold. The background is rather hazy. It looks like mist. It makes me think of morning fog. It's also quite an unsettling photo. I liked it when I first looked at it. I thought, oh, this is a very nice underwater scene. But the more I look at it, the more I feel unsettled with the contrast between the light sides to the left of the photo and the dark zones on the right of the photo and just slap bang in the middle is this seal which is looking directly at you. You almost can't look away from the photo. It's very eye-catching. It holds your gaze. The seal has a dark patch on the front of its face, and in that dark patch are two very frosty white lines that are going down, meeting at the bottom of the seal's face with a horizontal line connecting the two of them. The white lines form a capital letter H in the way they look. There are three or four whiskers on each side of its face. They are only the faintest little lines, but they are very dark outlines on the light-coloured face. You can nearly see the texture of the leopard seal and it looks silky. The skin looks very, very smooth. It almost looks pebbly, and I can imagine it being the texture of when you get a wet pebble at the beach, and it feels kind of slimy.